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REVOLUTION 



FREE GOVERNMENT 



NOT A EIGHT BUT A CKMfc 



AN ADDRESS 



JOSEPH P. THOMPSON, D.D., 



DELIVERED BEFORB 



THE TJKICOT LEAGUE CLUB, 



AND PUBLISHED AT THEIR REQUEST. 



CLUB-HOUSE, UNION SQUARE, 

No. 26 East Seventeenth St. 
1864. 



uj:\ ( )LUTION 

A.OAINST 

FREE GOVERNMENT 

NOT A EIGHT BUT A CRIME. 



AN ADDRESS 



JOSEPH P. THOMPSON, D. P., 



DELIVERED BEFORE 

THE" UJS t IO^ LEAGUE CLUB, 



AND PCP.L1S.1IEI> AT THEIR 1;E'.)I EST. 



CLUB-HOUSE, UNION SQUARE, 

No. 26 East Seventeenth St. 

1864. 






'Of 




C. A. A.LVOBD, 

Stbbbotyper IND Pkintke. 



Union League Club, 
2G East Seventeenth Street, March 15, 1864 
Ret. Joseph P. Thompson, D.D.: 

My Dear Sir: — It gives me great pleasure to bo the medium of com- 
municating to you the action of the Union League Club, at their last 
monthly meeting, after the delivery of your eloquent address. 

The following resolutions were unanimously adopted: 

" Resolved, That the thanks of the Union League Club be tendered to 
" the Rev. Joseph P. Thompson, D.D., for his lucid and eloquent exposition 
"of the rights of man and the principles of Free Governments, and of the 
" turpitude of armed rebellion against a Government so just and beneficent 
"as that under which we live. 

"Resolved, That the Rev. Dr. Thompson be requested by the Secretary 
" to furnish the Club with a copy of his discourse, for publication by the 
"Club." 

Indulging the hope, in common with those who enjoyed the privilege 
of hearing your address, that the request of the Club will be granted, 
I am, Rev. and dear Sir, 

Yours truly, 

Otis D. Swan, Secretary. 



32 West Thirty-Sixth Street, March 21, 1864. 
Mr. Otis D. Swan, Secretary Union League Club : 

Dear Sir: — Your favor of the 15th, communicating the request of the 
Union League Club for the publication of my address on Revolution, is 
gratefully acknowledged. I shall be happy to place the manuscript at 
their disposal as soon as I can prepare it for the press. Be pleased to 
express to the Club my thanks for their courteous reception and their 
complimentary resolution; and accept for yourself my acknowledgment 
of the handsome manner in which you have conveyed to me their action. 
I am, dear Sir, 

Very respectfully, 

Jos. P. Thompson. 



DEVOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT 
NOT A RIGHT RUT A CRIME. 



THE QUESTION FUNDAMENTAL. 

The war is schooling the nation in the principles that 
must hereafter secure the peaceable administration of its 
affairs. A government based upon the broadest doctrine 
of human rights, and framed in the soundest principles 
of political philosophy, is assailed not in its methods or 
measures, but at its foundation. The mine of the con- 
spirators was sprung under the arches upon which the 
whole fabric rests, and the ground trembles and the 
walls and pillars vibrate with the concussion. To reas- 
sure ourselves that the Constitution, the Union, the 
G-overnment will stand, we must go down and explore 
the foundations — to see whether any accepted principle 
has been dislodged; any pillar shaken out of place ; any 
arch or beam is cracked and ready to fall. The scrutiny 
may be anxious and severe; but the process is salutary 
and the result certain. It is to-day as Eichard Hooker 
wrote two centuries ago : " The stateliness of houses, the 
goodliness of trees, when we behold them, delighteth the 
eye: but that foundation which beareth up the one, that 
root which ministereth unto the other nourishment and 
life, is in the bosom of the earth concealed ; and if there 
beat any time occasion to search into it, such labor is 



G RE VOL I 77' >X A GAINST FREE G VERNMENT 

then more necessary than pleasant, both to them which 
undertake it and for the lookers-on. In like manner, the 
use and benefit of good laws, all that live under them 
may enjoy with delight and comfort ; albeit the grounds 
and first original causes from which they have sprung 
be unknown, as to the greatest part of men they are. 
But when they who withdraw their obedience, pretend 
that the laws which they should obey are corrupt and 
vicious ; for better examination of their quality, it be- 
hooveth the very foundation and root, the highest well- 
spring and fountain of them, to be discovered. Which, 
because we are not oftentimes accustomed to do, when 
we do it, the pains we take are more needful a great deal 
thau acceptable."* 

Eather would I say they are then acceptable because 
they are needful. Needful all the pains and cost of war ; 
needful all the toil of thought, by speech and pen inter- 
preting the lessons of the war and shaping its results ; 
needful that brain and blood should together work out 
the great issue of the conflict, by force of ideas no less 
tli an by the victory of the sword. For, that which we 
must needs determine now, is not only that this Free 
Government has the physical strength to stand, but that 
it stands upon what is itself settled and stable, because 
right and true. This is the issue raised by the rebellion, 
which would displace Liberty for Slavery as the corner- 
stone of political society, and would subvert the Kepub- 
lic by pleading against it that very right of revolution 
by which we won our place as a nation. 

CALHOUN THE AUTHOR OF THE REBELLION. 

This issue of ideas — like every conflict of principle — 
is historical. Hardly was American independence 
* Eccl. Polity, B. i. c. 1. 



NOT .1 RIGHT HUT A ClilMl!. 7 

achieved, when there began to appear symptoms of reac- 
tion against republican institutions ; and while schemes 
for reviving an aristocracy were nipped in the bud, a 
system of social despotism was suffered, to root itself in a 
soil consecrated, to liberty. Jefferson tells us that when 
the air breathed suspicions of monarchists in the first 
cabinet, Washington said to him " that he considered 
our Constitution an experiment on the practicability of 
republican government, and with what dose of liberty 
man could be trusted for his own good. ; that he was de- 
termined the experiment should have a fair trial, and 
would lose the last drop of his blood in support of it."* 
Scarce half a century had elapsed when the doctrine 
that liberty is an inalienable birthright of man from the 
Creator, was denounced in the Senate of the United 
States as " the most false and dangerous of all political 
errors." In his speech of June 27, 1848, on the Oregon 
Bill, Mr. Calhoun declared his conviction of the folly 
and danger of " admitting so great an error to have a 
place in our Declaration of Independence," and went so 
far as to forebode the destruction of our Union and sys- 
tem of government as the legitimate result of this grave 
fundamental error. f To counteract what Washington 

* Jefferson's TVorks, vi. 288. 

f " Let me say, Senators, if our Union and system of government are 
doomed to perish, and we to share the fate of so many great people who 
have gone before us, the historian who, in some future day, may record 
the events ending in so calamitous a result, will devote his first chapter 
to the ordinance of 1787, landed as it and its authors have been, as the 
first of that series which led to it. His next chapter will be devoted to 
the Missouri Compromise, and the next to the present agitation. * * * If 
lie should possess a philosophical turn of mind, and be disposed to look to 
more remote and recondite causes, he will trace it to a proposition which 
originated in a hypothetical truism, but which, as now expressed and now 
understood, is the most false and dangerous of all political errors." Mr. 



g REVOLUTION AG A TNST FREE G I ERSMEX T 

styled a large dose of liberty, Calhoun and his sehool of 
practitioners began to experiment with what dose of 
Slavery a republican people could be plied without 
wincing or retching. And with every dose the threat 
was, Take this or die ; — Slave-rule or Dissolution. 
. Twenty-five years ago this rebellion was distinctly pro- 
claimed by Calhoun in the Senate. " God forbid, - ' said 
he, " I should ever deny the glorious right of rebellion 
and revolution. Should corruption and oppression be- 
come intolerable, and not otherwise be thrown off — if 
liberty must perish, or the government be overthrown, I 
would not hesitate, at the hazard of life, to resort to revo- 
lution, and to tear down a corrupt government that could 
neither be reformed nor borne by freemen."* This sounds 
like the assertion of a grand right of oppressed hiAnanity, 
a heroic self-sacrifice for liberty, an echo of the%ery Dec- 
laration he had despised ; but when we inquire what is 
the liberty for which Calhoun would attempt a revolu- 
tion, we find it the liberty to have property in man, with- 
out encroachment from Northern opinion or restriction 
from territorial legislation. When we ask what are the 
oppressions against which he would revolt, he tells us 
that all attempts to disturb or question the right to hold 
slaves as property, " with the view to its subversion, are 
direct and dangerous outrages ;" and he appeals to the 
South to resist such outrages by force of arms, f 



Calhoun then denounces the popular saying, "all men are born free and 
equal," and adds that in the Declaration of Independence, "the form of 
expression, though less dangerous, is vot less erroneous." (Works, iv. 50G-8.) 

♦ Works, u. 6.15. Speech of Jan. btJi on Michigan. 

f Vol. iv. 52'.) and vol. Hi. 4 t3, 

In his speech of Aug. L2, L849, upon the Missouri Compromise Line, 
Mr. Qalhoun denounced the North because of the abolition agitation, pre- 
dicted the triumph of abolitionism in some future Presidential election, 



NOT .1 RIGHT BUT .1 CRIME. 9 

Here, then, we may study the rebellion in its pool and 

principle. The whole case lies in this nutshell — Wash- 
ington willing to shed the hist drop of his blood for the 
National Constitution as an instrument of freedoin. Cal- 
houn ready to overthrow that Constitution by rebellion 
unless he could use it, without restraint or protest, fov 
the defence and conservation of human slavery. 

For a time, Liberty itself trembled within the sacred 
ark to which the fathers had committed it. For, in the 

and declared that "nothing short oCthfc united and lixed determination of V 

the South to maintain Iter rights at evferv 1 hhzarri, could stop it." 

•' If I am rigjit," said--he, " the South is under solemn obligation, both to 
herself and to the rest of the Union, to>rally and take«the n-njady in her 
own hands, and that speedily, a's the only possible mode to bring the 
North to pause and reflect on consequences, if, indeed, it be not already 
too late for.that ; and if, unfortunately, it should prove to be so, to save 
hernelf." (iv. p. 530.) 

In his speech on the Slavery Question, March 4th, 1850, Mr. Calhoun 
insisted that the North should appease the South by opening new terri- 
tory to. slave emigration, by ceasing to agitate the slave question, and by 
so amending the Constitution that the South could have the power of pro- 
tecting herself against the preponderance of Northern States. Such, in 
his view, would be a just settlement of sectional questions. But, said he, 
" if you who represent the stronger portion cannot agree to settle them on 
the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the States we both 
represent agree to separate and part in peace. If you are unwilling we 
should part in peace, tell us so, and we shall know what to do, when you 
reduce the question to submission or resistance." (Works, iv. 573.) 

In his speech of Dec. 27, 1837, upon the Rights of the States, Mr. Cal- 
houn distinctly avowed the right of State rebellion against the General 
Government. 

" The only remedy is in the States' Rights doctrines ; and, if those who 
profess them in slaveholding States do not rally on them as their political 
creed, and organize as a party against the fanatics, in order to put them 
down, the South and West will be compelled to take the remedy into 
their own hands. They will then stand justilied in the sight of God and 
man ; and what, in that event, will follow, no mortal can anticipate." 
(Vol. iii. 155.) 

The South "had no fears for herself. She was full of resources, and 
would, he trusted, be prepared to meet the crisis whenever forced on her 
by the injustice or insults of the other portion of the Union." (iii. 195.) 4 

13* 



In REVOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT 

rising flood of Southern domination, Liberty, as Coleridge 
said of Burke, was " shut up, as it were, in a Noah's ark. 
with very few men, and a great many beasts." The dan- 
ger was that brute force and bloody threats would gain 
the mastery over liberty and law, over justice and virtue. 
Restrained at last in its encroachments upon the Consti- 
tution, the Slave-power broke forth, as Calhoun had 
threatened, in insurrection against the Constitution and 
the Union, and taking their cue from the master-spirit of 

In his speech on the Abolition Petitions, March 9, 1836, Mr. Calhoun 
insisted thai the Senate should deny a hearing to such petitions. 

" But if," said he, "instead of closing the door — if, instead of denying 
all jurisdiction and all interference in this question, the doors of Congress 
are to be thrown open ; and if we are to be exposed here, in the heart of 
the Union, to endless attacks on our rights, our character, and our institu- 
tions; if the other States are to stand and look on without attempting to 
suppress these attacks originating within their borders, and, finally, if this 
is to be our fixed and permanent condition, as members of this Confeder- 
acy, we will then be compelled to turn our eyes on ourselves. Come 
what will, should it cost every drop of blood, and every cent of property, 
we must defend ourselves ; and if compelled, we would staud justified by 
all laws, human and divine." (ii. 488.) 

In his speech on State Rights, Feb. 26, 18:;: J ,, Mr. C. said, '-the right of 
the States to judge of the extent of their reserved powers stands on the 
most solid foundation, and is good against every department of the Gene- 
ral Government ; and the judiciary is as much excluded from an inter- 
ference with the reserved powers as the legislative or executive depart- 
ments." (Vol. ii. 298.) 

In his speech of April 12, L 83 6, on " Suppressing Incendiary Publica- 
tions," Mr. Calhoun took the ground that in matters concerning State in- 
stitutions and policy, the laws of the General Government must yield to 
State laws: — "the low must yield to the high; the < venient to the ne- 
cessary ; mere accommodation to safety and security." lie warns the 
Senate that they will become abettors of Abolitionists. 

"Should such be your decision, by refusing to pass this bill, I shall say 
to the people of the South, Look to yourselves — you have nothing to hope 
from others. Mm 1 must tell the Senate, be your decision what ii may. 
thi South will never abandon the principles of this bill. If you refuse 
co-operation with our laws, and conflict should ensue between yours and 
our.-, the Southern Stateswill neveryield to the superiority of yours. We 
have a remedy in our hands, which in such event we shall not fail to apply. 



NOT A RIGHT BUT .1 CRIME. \ \ 

nullification, the leaders of the rebellion assert before the 
world their right of revolution, pleading the precedent of 
our national origin. The declaration lately put forth by 
the Congress at Richmond avows that the protection of 
slave property was the motive of the rebellion; that the 
preservation of the relations of labor and capital created 
by Slavery is the object of the Rebel Confederacy : for 
which, says the Congress, " we fell baek upon the right 
for which the colonies maintained the war of the Revo- 

We have high authority fur asserting that, in such cases, 'State interi>o- 
sition is the rightful remedy' — a doctrine first announced by Jefferson — 
adopted by the patriotic and republican State of Kentucky, by a solemn 
resolution, in '98, and finally carried out into successful practice on a re- 
cent occasion, ever to be remembered, by the gallant State which 1 in part 
have the honor to represent. In this well-tested and efficient remedy, 
sustained by the principles developed in the report, and asserted in this 
bill, the slaveholding States have an ample protection. Let it be fixed — 
let it be riveted in every Southern mind — that the laws of the slaveholding 
States for the protection of their domestic institutions are paramount to 
(lie laws of the General Government in regulation of commerce and the 
mail; that the latter must yield to the former in the event of conflict; and 
that if the Government should refuse to yield, the States have a right to 
interpose, and we are safe. With these principles, nothing but concert 
would be wanting to bid defiance to the movements of the abolitionists, 
whether at home or abroad ; and to place our domestic institutions, and 
with them our security and peace, under our own protection, and beyond 
the reach of danger." (Vol. ii. 532, 533.) 

In his Remarks on the Slave Question, Feb. 19, 1847, Mr. Calhoun, 
insisting upon the right of Southerners ''to emigrate with their [slave] 
property to the territories of the United States," uttered this threat: 

" Well, sir, what if the decision of this body shall deny to us this high 
constitutional right, not the less clear because deduced from the entire 
body of the instrument, and the nature of the subject to which it relates, 
instead of being specially provided for? What then? I will not under- 
take to decide. It is a question for our constituents, the slaveholding 
States — a solemn and a grave question, if the decision should be adverse. 
I trust and do believe that they will take under solemn consideration 
what they ought to do. I give no advice. Tt would be hazardous and 
dangerous for me to do so. But I may speak as an individual member of 
that section of the Union. There is my family and connections; there 1 
drew my first breath ; there are all my hopes. I am a planter— a cotton 



1 RE VOLV TION AG A INST FREE G 1 'ERXMENT 

lution, and which our heroic forefathers asserted to be 
clear and inalienable.''* 

EARL RUSSELL'S SOPHISM, 
This plea finds favor in high quarters abroad ; and its 
speciousness has served to cover the intrinsic atrocity of 
the Southern rebellion. Earl Russell, in his speech at 
Blairgowrie, on the 26th of September, 1863, alluded in 
these terms to political rebellion as an established prece- 
dent in the English theory of the State. He says of Mr. 
Sumner : " I cannot but wonder that this man, the off- 
spring of three, as we are of two rebellions, should be 
speaking like the Czar of Russia or Louis XIV. of the 
dreadful guilt of the crime of rebellion. I recollect that 
we rebelled against Charles I., against James II., and 
that the people of New England, not content with these, 
rebelled against George III. I do not say now whether 
all these were justifiable or wrong. I do not say whether 
the rebellion of the Southern States is a justifiable insur- 
rection — whether it is a great fact or a great crime — but 

planter. I am a southern man and a slaveholder — a kind and a merciful 
one, I trust — and none the worse for being a slaveholder. I say, for one, 
I would rather meet any extremity upon earth than give up one inch of 
our equality — one inch of what belongs to us as members of this great re- 
publicl What! acknowledged inferiority! The surrender of life is nothing 
to sinking down into acknowledged inferiority, (iv. 347.) 

"The day that the balance between the slaveholding States and the 
non-slaveholding States is destroyed, is a day that will not be far removed 
from political revolution, anarchy, civil war, and wide-spread disaster." 
(Vol. iii. 343.) 

* " Compelled by a long series of oppressive and tyrannical acts, culmi- 
nating at last in the selection of a Presidenl and Vice-President by a party 
confessedly sectional, and hostile to the South and her institutions, these 
States withdrew from the former Union, and formed a new Confederate 
alliance, as an independent Government, based on the proper relations of 
labor an i capital. 

"This step was taken reluctantly, by constraint, and after the exhaus- 
tion of every measure that was likely to secure us from interference with 



NOT A UK HIT BUT A CRIME. |;; 

I state the mere feet, that a rebellion is not in itself a 

crime of so deep a dye as to cause us to renounce our 
relations with people guilty of rebellion." 

This seemed so clever a hit at Mr. Sumner thai Lord 
John's auditors accepted it with much applause, as the 
end of argument. Yet it is simply a play upon w< >r< Is - 
and begs the question as to principles. Indeed, nothing- 
could be more shallow than the assumption upon which 
Earl Eussell's reasoning rests, and nothing more hostile 
to the well-being of society than the conclusion toward 
which it points. The right of armed resistance to gov- 
ernment — call it rebellion or revolution- — is not a naked 
abstract right, lodged within the political structure as a 
corrective power, to be invoked at pleasure; it is at besl 
a qualified and conditional right, and can exist only in 
extreme cases of justifying circumstances. We cannot 
say, " A rebellion is a rebellion ;" or, " Our fathers rebelled, 
therefore may we ;" for, the conditions failing, that which 
was made to them a right may be in us a crime. 

MR. JEFFERSON'S FALLACIES. 

The loose popular notion that revolution is a fixed 
right in society may be traced to a fallacy of Mr. Jeffer- 
son, which is so transparent that it needs only to be 
stated to refute itself. " The earth," says Jelferson, " be- 
longs always to the living generation ; they may manage 
it, then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during 

our property, equality in the Union, or exemption from submission to an 
alien government. The Southern States claimed only the unrestricted en- 
joyment of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Finding, by pain- 
ful and protracted experience, that this was persistently denied, wo deter- 
mined to separate from those enemies, who had manifested the inclination 
and ability to impoverish and destroy us; we fell back upon the right for 
which the colonies maintained the war of the Revolution, and which our 
heroic forefathers asserted to be clear and inalienable." 



14 REVOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT 

their usufruct They are masters, too, of their own 
persons, and consequently may govern them as they 
please. But persons and property make the sum of the 
objects of government. The constitution and the laws 
of their predecessors are extinguished then, in their 
natural course, with those whose will gave them being. 
This [will] could preserve that being till it ceased to he 
itself, and no longer. Every constitution, then, and every 
law, naturally expires at the end of thirty-four years. If it 
be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right"* 

Perhaps it is enough to say of this astounding theory, 
that it was written in Paris, in 1789 : it is French Direc- 
tory liberty, the liberty of the barricade supported by 
the guillotine, not Anglo-Saxon liberty, founded in insti- 
tutions and girt about with law. The theory contains a 
threefold fallacy. 1. It ignores the fact that men of 
different generations are always mingled together, con- 
temporaneously profiting by each other's labors ; so that 
it is impossible to mark the term where one generation 
begins and another ends. Vital statistics have averaged 
this at thirty-three years ; but the curtain does not fall 
upon the stage of life three times in a century, that the 
earth may be cleared of one generation and another may 
appear. Generations do not march on and off the stage 
in platoons; men are born and grow ; and hence, as Sir 
James Mackintosh has aptly said, "governments are not 
made, but grow." 

-. Again, Jefferson's theory makes no account of prin- 
ciples as entering into the constitution of society and of 
government — ethical principles, thai have a permanent 
life, and thai one generation plants with toil and blood 
for its successors. No alter generation has a right to dis- 
* Works, \ol. iii. 106. Letter to Madison. 



NOT .1 incur BUT .1 CRIME. \ ;, 

card these, and so deprive its posterity of the fruits of tin- 
Past. Under no pretext can we surrender the rights of 
free speech, a free press, a free conscience, which we hold 

as a heritage from the Past in trust for the Future. 

3. And hence, thirdly, the theory overlooks the fad 
that human society is organic, and exists in continuity, 
with certain great, uniform, transmissible and indefeasi- 
ble interests. 

Yet so possessed was Mr. Jefferson with his Parisian 
theory, that he would even provide tor periodical revolu- 
tion as a healthy agitation of society. Alluding to the 
Massachusetts insurrection, lie says : " The late rebellion 
in Massachusetts has given more alarm than I think it 
should have done. Calculate that one rebellion in thir- 
teen States, in the course of eleven years, is but one for 
each State in a century and a half. No country should 
be so long without a revolution."* And to carry out 
these notions in practice, Jefferson would provide in the 
social organism itself that "each generation, at intervals 
of twenty years, should solemnly revise its government, 
or choose for itself the form of government it believes 
most promotive of its own happiness;" since, without 
this periodical repairing of the whole political structure. 
" men will go on in the endless circle of oppression, 
rebellion, and reformation." 

But Mr. Jefferson's philosophy of rebellion is as falla- 
cious as are Earl Russell's historical parallels. That state 
of affairs upon which the right of revolution is grounded, 
being itself conditional, may not only fail to recur in 
every thirty, or hundred, or two hundred years but, 
through the improved organization of political society, 
may cease ever again to be possible: and its justifying 

* Vol. ii. S31. 



16 REVOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT 

conditions being precluded by the social constitution 
itself, the right would thenceforth determine, and could 
not be revived by appeals to precedent. 



THE QUESTION DEFINED. 

Every plea for revolution assumes the improvableness 
of human society; it is for bettering man's condition. 
But how much is society bettered, if, by the very theory 
of its improvement, it must always be liable to a violent 
overturning? if the background of the social order is not 
reason and moral right, but physical force ? if the state, 
when founded in sound ethical principles, and constituted 
for the highest welfare of society, must still harbor with- 
in its bosom the explosive force of revolution? For to 
assert a permanent right of revolution against any and 
every form of political organization, is practically to gov- 
ern human society by force, or by dread of force, till the 
end of time. Yet progressive revolutionists, of whatever 
creed, believe in the perfectibility of human society, and 
make the perfection of the social state their ultimate end. 
This I too accept, both as a political creed and as a prac- 
tical aim ; and in denying any further right of revolution 
under a specific form of political organization, I do but 
declare a broader faith in certain ultimate truths of po- 
litical ethics, and in certain ultimate facts in the constitu- 
tion of society. Revolution, or a series of revolutions, 
may lead to the recognition of these truths and the estab- 
lishment of these facts in the political structure. But 
once that point is reached, and political society is dis- 
tinctly and fairly established upon these facts and truths, 
and for these ends, then, in an age when knowledge and 
Christianity have free play, the permanence of moral 



KOT A lil GUT BUT A CRIME. \ 7 

causes influencing society will so far secure the well- 
ordering of the state, that its overthrow by violence can 
never become a right and a duty; but to attempt this 
must always be a wrong and a crime. 

In other words, when a community has reached that 
high state of political organization in which these things 
are secured — to wit, A free popular government with all 
its appropriate institutions (to be hereafter defined), and 
a constitution duly regulating the administration of that 
government, and itself amendable by the people, then, by 
virtue of those moral causes which in such an organiza- 
tion will essentially secure the well-ordering of the state, 
the right of revolution ceases from that community, and 
an armed uprising against such a free, popular, constitu- 
tional government, being necessarily without justifying 
conditions, can never become rightful, but must be always 
and simply a crime. 

The proposition in this general form may startle some 
by its novelty, and others by the breadth and the boldness 
of its assertion. It runs athwart traditions and prejudices 
derived from our own revolutionary epoch; yet it har- 
monizes with the Declaration of Independence. It 
contradicts that style of Fourth-of-July declamation 
which has gone to seed in this Southern rebellion ; but 
it is the logical sequence of the true doctrine of revolu- 
tion. 

To clothe it in a concrete form: We who are of 
English blood, and heirs of English liberty, did rebel and 
rightfully rebel against Charles I. ; we rebelled again, and 
rightfully, against James II. ; and again the third time 
we rebelled rightfully against George III. But did we 
thereby establish the law of an indefinite series of rebel- 
lions, justified by precedent, and to recur at intervals, as 



IS REVOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT 

a condition of progress for the Anglo-Saxon race ? True, 
each of the first two rebellions was a justifying precedent 
for that which came after; yet each, in proportion to the 
permanent value of its own gains, lessened the area of 
rightful revolution ; and our revolution of 1776, with its 
final and perfect result in the Constitution of 1789, swept-' 
over every remaining point of revolutionary right upon 
this soil; so that, instead of here establishing the right 
of revolution as an article of our political faith, and a 
sacred precedent for after ages, it really exhausted that 
right by its own success. Our fathers fought to estab- 
lish not the right of revolution, but the rights of man, and 
a government that should conserve those rights, and 
should therefore stand till the end of time. 



STABILITY OF GOVERNMENT. 

Now, the well-being of political society requires sta- 
bility in government, no less than freedom of individual 
life and of social progress under that government. Mr. 
J. Stuart Mill — than whom there is none abler ivpon such 
a theme — lays down as a condition of permanent political 
society, " the existence, in some form or other, of the 
feeling of allegiance or loyalty. This feeling may vary 
in its objects, and is not confined to any particular form 
of government ; but whether in a democracy or in a 
monarchy, its essence is always the same : viz. : that there 
be in the constitution of the state something which is 
settled, something permanent, and not to be called in 
question ; something which, by general agreement, has a 
right to be where it is, and to be secure against disturb- 
ance, whatever else may change. In all political societies 
which have had a durable existence, there has been sonic 



NOT A RIGHT BUT A CHIME. \§ 

fixed point; something which men agreed in holding 

sacred; which it might or might nol be lawful to contest 
in theory, but which no one could either fear or hope to 
see shaken in practice; which, in short (excepl perhaps 
during some temporary crisis) was in the common esti- 
mation placed above discussion. And the necessity of 
this may easily be made evident. A state never is, nor, 
until mankind are vastly improved, can hope to be, for 
any long time exempt from internal dissension ; for there 
neither is nor has ever been any state of society in which 
collisions did not occur between the immediate interests 
and passions of powerful sections of the people. What, 
then, enables society to weather these storms, and pass 
through turbulent times without any permanent weakening 
of the ties which hold it together ? Precisely this — that 
however important the interests about which men fall 
out, the conflict does not affect the fundamental principles 
of the system of social union which happens to exist; 
nor threaten large portions of the community with the sub- 
version of that on which they have built their calculations, 
and with which their hopes and aims have become iden- 
tified. But when the questioning of these fundamental 
principles is (not an occasional disease, but) the habitual 
condition of the body politic ; and when all the violent 
animosities are called forth, which spring naturally from 
such a situation, the state is virtually in a position of 
civil war ; and can never long remain free from it in act 
and fact."* Now, Mr. Jefferson's theory would keep so- 
ciety in a chronic state of chaos ; by subjecting not laws, 
measures, policy alone to the healthy revision of expe- 
rience, but government itself, in all that should give the 
sense of security and permanence, government in its very 
* Mill's Logic. Book vi. chap. x. p. 582. Americas edition. 



OQ HE VOL UTIOX A GAINST FREE G VERXMEXT 

form and essence, its fundamental institutions — subjecting 
this to a periodical demolition by general consent, as the 
a lit Tiiative of a violent revolution. It is impossible that 
society should exist upon such a basis. It is as if the 
citizens of New York should set apart certain periodical 
times hereafter for destroying their own houses, lest a 
mob should burn them down. 

GOVERNMENT A NECESSITY. 

Government, to answer properly its functions, must 
not only secure its subjects in their rights at home, and 
defend them abroad, but must carry the assurance of its 
own security and permanence. As Mill says, " there must 
be in the constitution of the state something which is 
settled, and not to be called in question." Now, to give 
this security, there must be in the minds of its citizens 
the conviction that Government is a Necessity of human 
Society, and therefore as really an ordinance of man's 
nature for his well-being, as any law or ordinance of the 
Creator concerning man. An absolute, independent in- 
dividualism is impossible to a being who begins his ex- 
istence under the restraints and obligations of the family, 
and who grows up amidst other families and persons, 
whose presence creates other mutual restraints and-obliga- 
tions. No man can assume this naked individualism as 
his stand-point of personal rights, and refuse allegiance 
to society except he can have in all things his own way. 
Society is not an aggregation of such units of individual- 
ism ; it is an organic whole, whose growth is parallel with 
the existence of mankind. "Man" says Montesquieu, 
" is born in society, and there he remains;" always a 
member of it, and always having toward it relations and 
obligations which he did not create and cannot annul. 



NOT A RIGHT BUT A CRIME. 21 

Society may be imperfect, corrupt, tyrannical in its spirit, 
its opinions, its laws ; it may be arbitrary in its structure, 
unjust and exacting in its demands ; the established order 
of things may demand renovation; yet the individual is 
not an independent force, outside of society, whose 
mission is antagonism and revolution, but a leavening 
power within society, of which he is an integral part. 

The state inheres in society, and government is a prime 
necessity of its existence. Without government there is 
chaos and the mob. The government may be corrupt, 
unjust, oppressive ; demanding reform even to the extent 
of revolution ; yet men should be trained to the idea, 
not that they are born enemies of government, but that 
government, however needing to be rectified, exists as a 
necessity of their own existence. 

This conviction, so opposite to Mr. Jefferson's theory 
of perpetual agitation at the very foundations of society, 
is justified alike by the teachings of Christianity, by a 
sound political philosophy, by the experience of mankind, 
and by common sense. And the education of the com- 
munity in this view of government, as being in its essence 
an ordinance of the Creator for man's wel are, is a first 
step toward the stability of government. That is most 
stable which rests in the intelligent conviction of men 
that it is useful and necessaiy. 

CONDITIONS OF STABILITY. 

But this education should be furthered by the structure 
of the particular government commending itself to the 
confidence of its subjects as wise and just. It is necessary 
to its stability, therefore — ■ 

I. That government be founded in and for the rights 
OF MEN", not in and for the interests of classes. I do not 



22 REVOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT 

say that government shall not care for interests, since a 
large class of interests — the currency, the usages of con- 
tracts and inheritance, the code of commerce, the protec- 
tion of authors and inventors, and the like — by common 
consent do fall within its province. But these are interests 
not so much of classes against classes, but of the whole 
community in and by its several members. By class 
interest we intend the special advantage of a section or 
caste in the community in opposition to the rest ; as the 
interest of a ruling house or race, the interest of a nobil- 
ity, of the priesthood, or of the army ; or, as in some 
European cities of the Middle Ages, the interest of par- 
ticular guilds, holding a monopoly of wealth, manufac- 
ture, trade. A government constructed with a view to 
conserve class interests, to favor the few at cost of the 
many, to uphold castes, political, ecclesiastical, hereditary, 
military, commercial — no matter in what interest — rests 
upon a false and therefore unstable foundation. For no 
caste-interest can be upheld by government save at the 
expense of some broad general right; and since all pro- 
gress tends toward the assertion of human rights, and the 
abolition of class usurpations and wrongs, governments 
maintained in the interest of classes must sooner or later 
fall But once a government is securely anchored in the 
rights of men, guarding the essential rights of human 
personality, and of liberty in the pursuit of good, and 
making these its just and equal care, it has in itself, and 
in its surroundings, the highest security and stability 
that can pertain to any human institution. And for this 
it is needful — ■ 

II. Thai society be organized in free institutions, 
which themselves are vital and permanent The institu- 
tion differs from the privilege or charter in that it is or- 



NOT A RIGHT BUT A CRIME. L >;; 

ganic in society itself. When the confederate barons of 

England, with their retainers, drawn np in battle array at 
Runnymede, wrung from King John the Great Charter of* 
June 19th, 1215, they gained certain concessions to per- 
sonal liberty, which have ever since been held among the 
great prerogatives of Englishmen, to wit : local and open 
courts of justice, independent of fear or favor from the 
crown ; and the pledge that no man should be arrested, 
imprisoned, fined, or otherwise injured in person or prop- 
erty, by act of the king himself, but only by the judg- 
ment of his peers, and by the law of the land. But 
these grand defences of liberty were held as concessions 
from the kingly power. They were writteu in the char- 
ter. They date from a parchment. "Well, a hundred 
years before, Henry I. had given a charter of franchises, 
every copy of which he sought afterwards to destroy ; 
and, four hundred years later, Sir Edward Coke could 
testify in Parliament that thirty -two times had the neces- 
sity arisen to have the provisions of Magna Charta sol- 
emnly reaffirmed and re-established against faithless 
kings. Such is the uncertain tenure of popular liberties 
when held as concessions from a superior power. Now, 
free and open courts in every county, a judieiary inde- 
pendent of the executive, the trial by jury for every ac- 
cused person — these are no longer privileges, but rights ; 
not concessions, but institutions. We do not go baek to 
Runnymede for their origin ; we do not search the musty 
parchments of Lincoln Cathedral and the British Museum 
for their sanction ; they belong to the organic structure 
of our society ; are a part of our growth — institutions 
that need not even a constitution to verify them. 

The charter that Winthrop, with his rare eloquence, 
won from Charles II. for the colonv of Connecticut, was 



24 REVOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT 

so ample in the spirit of liberty, that after the Revolution 
Connecticut needed no enlargement of civil freedom to 
make her a true democracy. That charter, rescued from 
the grasp of a tyrannical governor, and hidden in the old 
Hartford oak, has survived both the colony and the oak, 
to see its ancient grants grown into the life of a State that 
no longer depends upon its favor; for the town meeting, 
the elective legislature, the home-made laws of each dis- 
trict and county, are institutions of the soil in which the 
people grow as the natural body of their political life. 
And so, when the free ballot, the free school, the free 
press, the independent judiciary, the local magistrac} T , 
have come to be institutions, each endowed with an or- 
ganic life, then society itself is organized in the spirit of 
liberty, and liberty is safe, because it is no longer a grant 
from power, but itself the living, moulding Power in the 
state. This institutional form is a peculiarity of Anglo- 
Saxon liberty in distinction from the theoretical constitu- 
tions of the spasmodic republics of France. M. Ed. La- 
boulaye enumerates personal liberty, religious liberty, 
liberty of instruction, liberty of the press, municipal lib- 
erty, and liberty of association, as the natural and neces- 
sary concomitants of self-government ; using the English 
term " self-government," and adding, " the word is lacking 
in French, because we have not the thing."* That is a 
thing of English growth, like the British oak that grows 
on through the ages, and outlives the storms. 

III. To insure stability in government, the govern- 
ing; POWER MUST FAIRLY REPRESENT THE WELFARE OF 
THE WHOLE PEOPLE. Founded in the rights of man and 
upon institutions of freedom, it must be the embodiment 

*L'Etat '■! ses Limites, p. 72. 



NOT A RIGHT BUT A CHIME. 26 

of the national good, so far as this is capable of being 
represented by official organs. The rulers therefore must 
be elective, and amenable to public opinion through the 
press and through the polls. Suffrage may be more or 
less limited, according to the dictates of experience — for 
it is yet an unsettled problem by what rule to adjust suf- 
frage for the highest good of society as a whole; legisla- 
tion may be divided in manner and responsibility, and 
representation may be direct or indirect, as is seen in our 
universal resort to two houses differently constituted; — 
but whatever these modifications of the elective princi- 
ple, varying from the absolute democracy of a New Eng- 
land town meeting to the circuitous election of a United 
States senator, or the responsibility of a ministry appoint- 
ed by the British crown to a negative vote of the House 
of Commons, still the principle must obtain that the 
government exists for the whole, and fairly represents 
the welfare of that whole. This is the essential concep- 
tion of a free, popular government. 

In such a conception, the principle of a political na- 
tionality, so much insisted on by European liberalists, 
finds its just weight. A nationality may be compound- 
ed of several races by intermarriage, within the same 
territorial limits, as is true to-day of the American peo- 
ple, the English, and, to some extent, of the French and 
the Italians. A nationality may also embrace within it 
races that remain physiologically distinct, while practi- 
cally commingling as one people. Thus the negro and 
the Jew in this country retain their peculiarities of race, 
yet they do not exist apart as communities, but through 
the distribution of their individual members are integral 
parts of the nation. Entire homogeneousness of popula- 
tion, therefore, in respect of race and origin, is not essen- 
2 



2 (3 RE VOL UTION AG A IX ST b REE G VERS MEN T 

tial to the unit of nationality, nor to secure an equal 
administration of the government for the whole people 

But wlnre a race segregated territorially is joined po- 
litically to another race superior in numbers and power, 
as the Irish to the English, the Venetians to the Aus- 
fcrians, the Poles to the Kussians; or where different races, 
upon the same soil are kept collectively distinct by social 
and religious organization, like the Christian races in 
Turkey, there a proper and uniform sentiment of nation- 
ality is impossible, and there is a constant temptation for 
the larger and stronger race to govern the rest in its own 
interest. Hence, in order to a free popular government 
which shall consult the welfare of the whole people, the 
principle of nationality must enter fairly, though not ex- 
clusively, into the constitution of such a government. 

Not nativism, in a narrow partisan sense, but nation- 
ality, as comprehending the whole people in one unit of 
political existence, is essential to our idea of a free popu- 
lar state. There must be " a feeling of common interest 
among those who live under the same government, and 
are contained within the same natural or historical boun- 
daries ; so that they shall feel that they are one people ; 
that their lot is cast together; that evil to any of their 
fellow-countrymen is evil to themselves; and that they 
cannot selfishly free themselves from their share of any 
common inconvenience by severing the connection."* Jn 
this sense of the term, a strong and active principle of na- 
tionality is essential to the durability of the body politic ; 
and hence the government must be constituted and ad- 
ministered impartially, for the whole people. 

: Mill a Logic, B. vi. chap. 10, i>. 583. 



NOT A incur BUT .1 CRIME. 27 

A TRUE POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY. 

At the first, as we have seen, popular liberties were 

concessions from the reigning power. Next these were 
secured by constitutional checks upon the royal preroga- 
tive, as when the British Commons carried the greal point 
of originating money bills and voting subsidies to the 
crown. But government by the people is not fairly at- 
tained until the people, in distinction from any hereditary 
class among them, elect their rulers, and are themselves 
eligible to the place of power. Lord Brougham defines 
the essence of an aristocracy to be, that " a class should 
exist endowed with the supreme power, while into that 
class admission is denied to the people at large, or can 
be had only by consent of the select few." Now, to re- 
strict suffrage by distinctions or limitations of blood, 
race, color, birth, or hereditary rank, would be to create 
an aristocracy of electors ; but to attach to the right of 
suffrage certain conditions of age, residence, property, or 
education, does not create an aristocracy, since the con- 
ditions are such as all men may attain unto. They rest 
not upon natural differences, nor hereditary artificial dis- 
tinctions, but upon personal merit. 

So with qualifications for office. The state may re- 
quire that, to be eligible to certain offices, one must be 
native born ; that for others he must be of a certain age ; 
that for certain posts in the army and navy he shall have 
graduated at the military or the naval school ; but none 
of these conditions restrict the rights or the freedom of 
the citizen, or deprive him of his just weight in public 
affairs. So long as the people, in distinction from an 
hereditary family, and in distinction from an exclusive 
order of men in the community, are themselves the nit i- 



2S REVOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT 

mate source of power, and, as a whole, do directly or in- 
directly participate in the supreme power of the state, 
there is a free popular government, whatever modifica- 
tions expediency or experience may apply to the elective 
franchise or to the tenure of office. 

With all his radical proclivities, Jefferson defines a 
government by the people to be that in which the choice 
of representatives is shared " by every man of ripe years 
and sane mind, who either contributes by his purse or 
person to the support of his country."* This definition 
can hardly be improved ; yet it would disfranchise many 
who boast themselves the disciples of Jefferson, who in 
this hour of their country's need and peril contribute 
neither purse nor person to its support ! 

Aristotle would reduce all governments to two kinds, 
marked by opposite tendencies ; — " that in which the good 
of the community is every thing, and that in which it 
goes for nothing." A free popular government, in which 
every thing tends normally to the good of the community, 
is the perfection of government, and has the highest war- 
rant of stability. 

NEED OF A CONSTITUTION. 

IV. Yet it is needful that a free government be defined 
and regulated by a constitution, itself amendable. The 
community, whose good is the end of government, does 
not always at the first discern its own good; does not 
always consult that good simply, or in the best manner; 
is not always free from prejudice or passion, from igno- 
rance or party bias, or the influence of base and artful 
men: and therefore a free popular government needs 
checks upon itself, in the interest of both, justice and 

* Jefferson's Works, vol vii. p. .'519 



NOT A RIGHT BUT A CRIME. 29 

liberty. Such a government can be safely administered 
only under a written constitution— the organic law of 
the state ; a constitution framed in a time of calmness, 
with wise deliberation, and for the one purpose of making 
the government to be administered under it, best sub- 
serve the welfare of the whole people. Not liberty alone, 
but "law-girt liberty ;" not mere popular government, but 
constitutional regulated freedom, — a government at once 
by law and under law ; and that law supreme and abso 
lute in its authority, yet itself restrained from an arbi 
trary and despotic infallibility because it is amendable; — 
not however by the government nor by the populace, but 
by the solemn deliberative action of the chosen repre- 
sentatives of the sovereign power ; this union of LAW 
and liberty, of free government with fixed authority, 
combines in the highest degree the stability of freedom 
with the flexibility of its forms — the order of society 
with the improvement of political administration. A 
government thus constituted can stand if human society 
can exist ; it is made to stand ; it ought to stand. 

PERFECTION OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. 

Never before in the history of the world have these 
several elements of stability in government been com- 
bined as in the Government of these United States. 
Founded upon the broadest declaration of the essential 
equality and the inalienable rights of men ; embosomed 
in organic institutions of justice and of freedom ; fairly 
representing the whole people, and constituted for their 
equal benefit ; and ordered by that grand Constitution, 
the elaborated, concentrated, and harmonious wisdom of 
the sages of the nation ; accepted by the people, and by 



,°,0 REVOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT 

them ordained "to establish justice, promote the general 
welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves 

and their posterity :" — a Constitution that denies to the 
ablest general or statesman a title of nobility; that makes 
the President of the nation liable to impeachment for 
treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors; 
that forbids Congress to assume any powers not expressly 
delegated; thai watches and cheeks every tendency of 
government to encroach upon the people; and then says 
to the humblest citizen, in the name of the greatest of 
nations, "Your speech, your religion, your business, 
your locomotion shall be free; your person and your 
house shall be secure; you shall not be deprived of life, 
liberty, or property, without due process of law; if ac- 
cused of crime, you shall have a speedy and public trial, 
by an impartial jury of your own district; you can com- 
pel your witnesses, and shall have counsel at our cost for 
your defence. You — the individual man, down there in 
the most humble and obscure position in society — in the 
eye of the Constitution, are greater than all its official 
executors: them it watches and restrains, that they do 
you no wrong ; you it defends and secures in every right." 
Such a government is made to stand ; it ought to stand ; 

IT WILL STAND. 

THE RIGHT OF REVOLUTION. 

But how does such a government stand toward that 
righl of revolution, which was never more strongly 
asserted than in its own origin ? 

Then' is a righl of revolution. The divine warrant For 
civil government, given both in the Bible and in the 
nature of things, cannot be pressed, as the dotard on the 
throne of Prussia would press it, into sanctioning tyranny, 



\<>T .1 EIGHT BUT A CRIME. ;;| 

and forbidding the redress of wrongs by an appeal to 
arms. The right of resistance is, in its place, as sacred 
as the duty of obedience. The Bible, speaking in popu- 
lar language, and not with the formal exactness of philo- 
sophical definition, lays down general truths broadly, 
without those qualifications and exceptions that specific 
cases would fairly authorize. The doctrine so clearly 
taught, that Christianity is not to organize a crusade 
against civil government, but should uphold the state as 
a necessary and a divine institution, proceeds on the 
assumption that the government, in the main, answers 
the purpose of its institution, as the protector of the 
good and a terror to the evil. If, however, by injustice 
and violence, the government becomes an unbearable 
oppression, there rests in Society, which gives form to 
the State, an ultimate right to redress itself, by overturn- 
ing or otherwise changing the falsified government, in the 
interest of a true and righteous ordering of the state. 

We are liable, however, to be misled by the term 
" Right of Revolution," as if this were a reserved right 
lodged somewhere within the political structure itself. 
But a revolution is the overturning of the established 
order of things with a view to establish a new order in 
its stead ; and therefore, in strict logic, there can be no 
right of revolution latent within an existing political 
system. 

What we intend by the right of revolution may be 
better defined as the moral duty of resistance to 
tyranny and wrong, even to the extent of breaking up 
the whole established order of things ;* not our right, 
then, as citizens or subjects, but our duty as men. And 

* For this distinction I am indebted to my valued friend, Proi'. Francis 
Lieber, LL.D. 



32 BE VOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT 

this duty, when the case arises, we must be ready to 
perform, or, for example's sake, to perish in the attempt. 
But, as a duty, it must be capable of being defended upon 
moral grounds, defended before God, defended in history, 
defended by its motives and results. 

To j ustify a revolution, therefore — to clothe it with the 
sanctity of duty — these three things must concur: 

1. The movement must be founded in justice, and 
must aim at a result which in itself will be right and 
good. 

2. The evils against which it protests must be griev- 
ous and unbearable wrongs. 

3. The revolution should appear to be the only, and, 
at the same time, a feasible mode of redress. 

Bad government, at the worst, may be better than 
anarchy ; — and such are the horrors of civil war, that no 
community or portion of the body politic can be justified 
in invoking these, except as a last resort against des- 
perate wrongs, and with a reasonable hope of success in 
the attempt to win justiee by the sword. While, there- 
fore, the right of revolution may be valid for Italy against 
Austria, or for Poland against Russia, it is impossible 
that a case should ever arise in which an armed insurrec- 
tion against a constitutional free government would be 
justifiable. In such a government the Constitution 
stands ever t<> restrain, or, if need be, to judge the admin- 
istrators of government in matters of alleged injustice ; 
and the acting government itself can be changed at 
limited periods. All wrongs can be redressed, all wrong- 
doers can be removed in time, by peaceable methods; 
and. at the most, nothing could be gained by insurrection 
Wut a change of rulers — which can be gained without it 
— and an insurrection could give no better security fur 



NOT A RIGHT BUT A CRIME 33 

the character of those it raised to power than would a 
peaceable election. 

THE RIGHT USE OF TERMS. 

Let us look at this more closely. There is a right or 
duty of revolution. But what sorl of a right is it? A 
constant, omnipresent right, that maybe pui forth at any 

time, for any end? Is it the right to get up a mob and 
a counter-mob, a barricade and a counter-barricade, at 

c\ ery election ? Is it what the " New Gospel of Peace" 
describes as the specialty of a certain type of citizen, who 
" lovctk fighting for fighting's sake, and without schyn- 
dees he pineth away, and life is a "burden unto him?" 
The first French republican constitution had a section de- 
claring that citizens have a right to resist with arms unjust 
laws. This Dr. Lieber well describes as "armed nullifi- 
cation en permanence;" or, we may say, Government 
holds only under a lease from Anarchy, voidable at will. 

My neighbor has a right, m extremis, to blow up his 
house with gunpowder, to arrest the spread of fire. But 
is the right to put kegs of powder into his cellar and blow 
up his house, the same kind of a right with that to dig a 
cellar and build a house by my side ? Clearly, this be- 
comes a right only in a great emergency, when it is the 
last hope of deliverance ; at any other time the act would 
be a crime. Now, the right of revolution is of that 
nature ; it is not absolute, but conditional ; only certain 
rare exigencies and combinations can bring it into being, 
and without these, clearly and forcibly existing, it is a 
crime to attempt a revolution. 

So great are the calamities of civil war, so frightful the 
horrors of anarchy, that the overturning of government 
may be rightfully attempted only for the ends of justice 



3-± REVOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT 

■ — never for the interest of a party, for the success of a 
dynasty, from disappointed ambition, or for a mere 
change of political policy. There must be in it that 
which appeals to the moral sense of men as just and 
right, to warrant a movement that may deluge the land 
with Mood and shroud every house in mourning. 

And, even with light upon its side, the movement will 
not be justified by mere annoyances, discomforts, or 
occasional burdens and grievances, that affect not the 
core of society, and that time might relieve or allay, but 
by accumulated and unbearable wrongs. 

And even then the revolution must have a fair 
prospect of success to warrant the fearful responsibility of 
attempting it. " The evils must have become intolerable 
before the resistance is to be attempted ; the parties whose 
rights are invaded must first exhaust every peaceful, and 
orderly, and lawful means of obtaining redress. An in- 
surrection is only to be justified by the necessity which 
leaves no alternative; and the probability of success is to 
be weighed, in order that a hopeless attempt may not in- 
volve the community in distress and confusion."* 

EARL RUSSELL'S THREE REBELLIONS. 

Each of the three rebellions cited by Earl Enssell had 
these justifying grounds, that constituted it a rightful 
revolution. When the ill-fated Charles had arrested 
Parliamentary leaders for words uttered in debate ; had 
assessed money without law, and imprisoned citizens for 
uon-payment; had denied the writ of habeas corpus in 
timeof peace; had suppressed Parliament ; had used the 
Star Chamber for the torture of political victims, by 
branding, whipping, slitting the nose, cropping the ears, 

* Brougham's Political Philosophy, Part iii. chap. xii. 



NOT .1 RIGHT BUT .1 CRIME. 

at the tyrant's whim; and, finally, would (urn the army 
into an engine of his despotic will, it, was plain that all 
the rights and liberties of Englishmen were gone. These 
were unbearable wrongs. Begun under the despotic 
James, they had grown and multiplied, under his more 
despotic son, against laws and charters, against petitions 
and remonstrances, against oaths and covenants, against 
patience and concession, until the only hope of redress lay 
in an appeal to anus; — the only alternative of the nation 
was an unmitigated despotism or a violent revolution. 

And when, forty years later, the had blood of the Stu- 
arts, not cured by the terrible lancet of Whitehall, broke 
out anew in the monstrous dogma of James II. — " the 
king from God — law from the king" — and everything in 
the state — religion, trade, finance, justice, the persons and 
the lives of men — must be held at the absolute will of the 
tyrant, there was need that the unfinished revolution of 
the last generation should be completed by expelling the 
Stuart dynasty, and bringing in a new order of things. 
That last great appeal of Englishmen to the sword was 
for justice and the rights of man, against accumulated 
and unbearable wrongs ; and well has it been said, that 
the English government was then "made to rest upon 
the people's Right of Resistance, as upon its corner- 
stone." 

And with what solemn majesty did our fathers take 
up their reluctant appeal to arms, the last, only redress 
against unbearable wrongs ! That long indictment 
against the king of Great Britain, of abuses and usur- 
pations having indirect object the establishment of an 
absolute tyranny, were itself their sufficient justification. 
But they do not plead this until every moral means has 
been exhausted. " In every stage of these oppressions, 



3G REVOLUTION A GAINST FREE G VEENMENT 

we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms ; 
our repeated petitions have been answered only by re- 
peated injuries." And so, acquiescing in the necessity, 
they take up this last dread appeal to the Supreme 
Judge of the world. 

Proud arc we to be the offspring of three such rebel- 
lions — conceived only in the interest of Justice, attemp- 
ted only at the stern behest of duty to Liberty and to 
Man, and achieved without, abuse of power or stain of 
crime. And therefore do we stand in the name of all 
that these solemn ordeals of the sword have secured, to 
insist that well-ordered freedom shall not be disturbed 
by a factious insurrection mocking the sacred name of 
revolution. 



THE TEST APPLIED TO OUR OWN GOVERNMENT. 

Test now the right of revolution by the principles of 
a constitutional government founded in institutions of 
popular liberty, and existing for the ends of justice, of 
or< Ler, and of freedom. Against a government so consti- 
tuted, in its structure, its genius, its aims, no plea of in- 
justice or wrong can ever arise, no warrant for resistance 
in the name of human rights, or for any real interest of 
man. The utmost ground of complaint would lie against 
the temporary administration of such a government — 
the usurpation of power by those in authority, or the 
tyranny of the majority in violation of the constitution, 
or through a perversion of its forms. But this can never 
go to such a pitch of unbearable outrage that the over- 
turning of the state will be the only, and, therefore, the 
justifiable remedy. 



NOT A EIGHT BUT A CRIME. 37 

Under an autocracy, like thai of Russia, either of two 
things, or both, might be gained by a revolution: — a 
change in the dynasty, or a change in the form of govern- 
ment, to a republic or a limited monarchy. Yet, under 

such a government, revolution is not justified by every 
wrong. If Nicholas is an oppressor, it may be well to 
wait for Alexander. He may emancipate the serfs; he 
may inaugurate a system of constitutional freedom. It 
is yet to be proved whether Poland will now gain more 
by fighting than might have been won by endurance. 
There is reason to suspect that her present insurrection 
was prompted by her aristocracy, in order to perpetuate 
serfdom. Yet, for her accumulated wrongs, there does 
remain to Poland the sacred right of revolution, in the 
interest of nationality. 

In a mixed government, like that of England, though 
no change of form may be desirable, a revolution might 
be needful to purge the land of a race of tyrants like the 
Stuarts. Yet when a headstrong fool upon the throne 
of Prussia attempts to subvert the constitution by royal 
prerogative, it does not follow that revolution is the 
remedy. Better than a deluge of fire and blood, the at- 
titude of legal and moral resistance in which that nation 
calmly waits for the accession of the Crown-Prince — 
doubly pledged to freedom by his own professions, and 
by the hand of England's noblest daughter. 

But, under such a government as I have described, a 
change in the form of government is in no case to be 
desired, since such a change could only be a step buck- 
ward, against the rights and liberties of men. The fain 
of government, if not the best conceivable, is the besl 
attainable with human imperfection. The only thing to 
be sought, therefore, by revolution, is a change of rulers 



38 REVOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT 

and measures. Grant, then, that these are wicked and 
oppressive in the extreme; that rulers sworn to uphold 
the Constitution violate it by outrages upon the con- 
science, the property, the person, the life of the citizen. 
Shall we seek redress by an armed revolution? 

In taking up arms to oust an administration, we begin 
by violating the Constitution. Still, the exigency might 
allow for that. But if we triumph in the light, what 
next? Shall the men raised into power by the bayonet 
be kept there by force of arms ? Then do we trample 
free government under foot ! Then do we substitute for 
a free election a war of factions, and inflict upon society 
a greater evil than we cure! Is there a man in all this 
land who would consent, upon the pica of " military 
necessity," that the present Administration should hold 
over without the form of a new election ? 

If, then, to save liberty, we fall back upon the election, 
the ousted party may renew its triumph at the polls ; or 
what guarantee have we in history, or in human nature, 
or from our experience of politicians, that the very men 
we have fought into power will not turn and sell them- 
selves to the conquered for their votes ? Holding the 
form of free government to be the best, can any thing 
be hoped lor by revolution under such a government 
thai would warrant the effusion of treasure and blood, 
the monstrous cost and suffering and woe of civil war '( 
—any thing thai were not as surely gained by time and 
patienl working? 

I grant the immediate check to usurpation, by means 
of armed resistance, and the moral lesson of such resist- 
ance to wrong. But the government itself, remember, is 
constituted in and lor right; and society, in the end, 
gravitates toward the right. At length reason and moral 



NOT A RIGHT HUT A C1UML: ;;<» 

firmness, with wise political action, must conquer abuse 

and wrong in a free government. There is for these a 
sure and peaceful remedy; and therefore, to stir the 
foundations of society by revolt, and give the fatal pre- 
cedent of fighting factions, is itself a wrong. The most 
wayward and tyrannical majority may be subdued, 
the most adroit political usurpation may be overcome 
without recourse to arms. And such incidents of tree 
government can never be swept from our path by 
revolution. 



FREEDOM A MORAL REGULATOR. 

I have assumed, as underlying this whole argument, 
that in the condition of society essential to the origina- 
tion of such a government, certain principles of human 
nature, under the action of established moral causes, will 
essentially secure the well-ordering of the state. This 
is the safeguard against a permanent abuse of power by 
the majority, and also against such an extreme and per- 
manent corruption of the people as would vitiate their 
-political institutions. I affirm neither the divine right 
of republics nor the infallibility of the people ; but, the 
existence of free institutions at the basis of a popular 
constitutional government, supplies a regulative power 
against the misdirection of the government, and against 
the abuse of popular sovereignty. Those institutions — 
the free press, the free school, the free church, the local 
administration of political affairs and of legal justice — 
are training schools, both in personal liberty and in self- 
government. 

Freedom of individual pursuits favors business occu- 
pations and domestic arrangements, that make the eiti- 



40 REVOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT 

zeii conservative of law and order, even upon selfisli 
grounds. A man's family, Lis shop, his farm, are so 
many hostages for his loyalty to a state that is consti- 
tuted upon the very principle of protecting him in their 
jm >ssessi< hi and use. The Ked-republican, or socialist, of 
continental Europe, the ragged barn-burner of Tip- 
perary — however at the first confounding liberty with 
lawlessness, — no sooner tastes the satisfaction of acquir- 
ing and owning property, than he becomes the champion 
of order. Freedom of discussion, sooner or later, ex- 
poses the arts of demagogues ; freedom of personal action 
breaks the spell of parties, ami fritters down majorities 
when these would grow tyrannical. A Van Buren, a 
Douglas, a Dickenson, will break the very organization 
they had helped to compact. A collective despotism is 
hard to maintain under the forms of free government, with 
a c< institution pledged to liberty and justice, and with the 
oft-recurring scrutiny of the ballot-box. Indeed, against 
the dearest interests of individuals; against the vested 
rights of man in the organic structure of the state; 
against the power of knowledge, of virtue, of religion, 
in a free community, it is impossible that the despotism 
of a majority should stand long enough to warrant re- 
sistance by violence. This is emphatically true when, 
as in our government, the ruling power is not the naked 
Qumerical majority, but what Mr. Calhoun so aptly styled 
the Concurrent Majority of two bodies representing 
different interests, parties, forms, or policies in the state. 
Seldom can this concurrent majority be held togetherfor 
a wrong upon society itself. To resist by force a major- 
ity or a faction forcefully subverting the government, is 
not revolution, but the defence of order, freedom, and law. 



NOT .1 RIGHT BUT .1 CRIME. 41 

A CASE IN POINT. 

By a long-practised usurpation, and the corruption of 
a political majority, the slave aristocracy gained control 
of the Government of the United Slates; abrogated the 
ancient covenants of freedom; converted the Supreme 
Court into an agent of despotism ; and made the Con- 
stitution itself, and all the machinery of government, 
the slave of slavery. We me1 that usurpation — how? 
By organized violence ? We met it first by moral resisl 
ance to the kidnapper's law, standing upon the inde- 
feasible rights of conscience, which can never Buccumb 
to wrong. We harbored the fugitive and bore the pen- 
alty. We met that usurpation by argument and appeal 
to the judgment and the moral sense of the nation. We 
met it by political organization, and measures for sell- 
protection and the defence of liberty. We met it by the 
steady growth of intelligence and virtue in public senti- 
ment, waiting for a generation of young men who would 
not be slaves. And then, at last, we met it squarely in 
the issue of a Presidential election and triumphed over 
it, by lifting an honest and true man to the Executive 
chair. And now we see how, in all this, Divine Provi- 
dence had worked with and for us, giving us in Mr. 
Lincoln, His chosen instrument for the salvation of the 
nation and the emancipation of a race. But there is no 
stain of blood upon our hands ; there is no cry of widows 
and orphans in our ears ; there is no line of graves across 
our path ; there is no protest of outraged liberty and 
right against us, for that great moral and political revo- 
lution achieved by fidelity to truth and freedom, and by 
patient continuance in well-doing. 

So will it ever be with the cause of Right under free 



42 REVOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT 

government. Nothing else ought to prevail, and this 
surely will prevail. Revolution lor a wrong is a crime. 
Armed revolution for the right finds no justifying ne- 
cessity; for I repeat it, that the government is already 
constituted for the Eight ; that society surely gravitates 
toward the Right ; and that truth and reason will win 
the Right, unsullied by the smoke, the tears, the bloody 
anguish of war. Here, then, revolution can have no 
footing and no defence. 

THE CRIME OF THE REBELLION. 

It follows from these premises that the authors of this 
Southern rebellion are guilty of a stupendous and un- 
mitigated CRIME— a crime that finds no specious pre- 
cedent in the history of revolutions, and no pretence of 
authorization in any right of society or any philosophy 
of the state. 

This rebellion is an armed assault upon the authok- 
ITY of tiie government as constituted by regular pro- 
cedure, under the supreme organic law of our civil 
liberty. It i> therefore an insurrection against the order 
of society, as here instituted and regulated by the spirit 
of freedom. It is impossible to evade this simple fact. 
There is but one lawful government possible in these 
United States. That government rests not upon a com- 
pact or confederation of independent sovereignties; but, 
after tin' lit i lure of such confederation, the PlOPLE of 
tin United States, in their original sovereignty, prescri- 
bed the mode of constituting and of renewing the govern - 
ment, and, if need be, of amending it. The insurrection 
i s again s t < ; < > v k i ; n m k n t as representing the organic order 
of a free -■ >cietj . 

It is, therefore, an assault upon the sovereignty' of 



NOT A RIGHT BUT A CRIME. -\;\ 

the nation, as expressed through its constitutional 
forms. For what is it that, in this country, is represented 
in the government? A family? a house? a tribe? a 
faction? Nay, the majestic Sovereignty of a Free Peo- 
ple; and this the Rebellion would drag down and tram- 
ple under foot. 

The rebellion is an assault upon the principle of 
regulated liberty, which is the highest form of polit- 
ical freedom. For the ballot-box and the free popular 
election, it would substitute armed dictation at the polls, 
or a standing war of factions. Greater than all questions 
of public policy and of social economy arising out of the 
war, is this question of the ages : Shall a free people be 
governed by laws constitutionally enacted, or by the law 
of the strongest and the terror of the sword ? The heirs 
of three revolutions that sprung out of that very ques- 
tion, now see all put in jeopardy that these revolutions 
had gained. 

For, this rebellion is an assault upon all the princi- 
ples AND INSTITUTIONS OF JUSTICE, HUMANITY, AND 
freedom embodied in our national life, and upon all the 
hopes combined with it. It is distinctly a war of civil- 
izations, of systems of social order — a war of despotism, 
built upon the degradation of labor and of man, against 
freedom, with the school, the press, the ballot, the dig- 
nity of labor and of man. I put it to Earl Eusscll if it 
is a question, if it can be a question, whether such a re- 
bellion is simply a great fact or a great crime ? a crime 
of so deep a dye that a son of the English Revolution 
should spurn all relations with the people guilty of it. 
A greater Englishman than Russell, Mr. Richard Cob- 
den, has said : " This is an aristocratic rebellion against 
democratic srovernment. " 



44 REVOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT 

THE GUILT OF ITS ABETTORS. 
To palliate this rebellion, to apologize for its authors, 
is to invoke its guilt and to share its criminality. The 
issue it involves is in no sense a question of political 
measures, parties, or policy ; no question of the modifica- 
tion of government for the welfare of the people, for any 
right of man. for any interest of justice or humanity. It 
is simply a crime against society, a crime against free- 
dom, a crime against man. He who would wink at such 
a rebellion, who would openly or covertly further it, can- 
not be the friend of his country ; cannot be the friend of 
its Constitution; cannot be the friend of liberty. He 
makes himself partaker in an enormous crime. To allow 
the rebellion is to warrant the subversion of free institu- 
tions by factious violence; to warrant an armed resist- 
ance to the constitutional judgment of the people. And 
that, if ever we are capable of it. will be the crime of na- 
tional suicide, which God will surely visit upon us, and 
for which there will be no grave deep enough to hide 
our infamy.* 

OUR DUTY TO MANKIND. 

We are called upon, therefore, to annihilate this rebel- 
lion, in the interest not only of our social order, bu1 of 
all mankind. Here at last the right of revolution, to 
which the groaning peoples of Europe cling, had wrought 
itself out in the highest forms of liberty attainable by 
man. Hungary, Venetia, Greece, Poland, France, how 

* The allowance of a right of secession would be equivalent to self-de- 
struction. As Laboulaye has Baid, "A federal contract which maybe 
broken a< the pleasure of the confederated Btates, carries anarchy and dis- 
solution within itself, for it subsists only at the good-will of the parties, 
and i- at the mercy of human passions." 

L.ofC. 



NOT A RIGHT BUT A CM Mi:. 45 

terrible their penalties in abortive attempts to win popu- 
lar freedom by revolution ! How uncertain as yet the 
Hold of Prussia, and even of Italy, upon constitutional 
rights so dearly won ! Here alone was it seen thai revo- 
lution in behalf of justice and freedom against unbear- 
able tyranny, could issue in a wholesome, consistent, 
orderly, and stable Liberty. And now, the viperous des- 
potism nursed upon our soil would smite that Liberty; 
and all the despots of the earth are crying, "Smite it 
down ; let the people see what comes of their revolutions, 
and constitutions, and republics.''' We stand, then, for 
the suffering peoples of the earth, to prove that they suffer 
and rise and fight not for a mockery, but for a grand and 
imperishable reality ; that Liberty once fairly won, and 
girded about with institutions of justice and freedom, 
can be shaken no more ; can stand against foes without 
and foes within ; stand in the might of Truth ! stand in 
the heart of a Great People ! stand in the strength of 
Almighty Grod ! 

We fight to-day for Poland, for Hungary, for Venice, 
putting down the crime of rebellion against Freedom, 
that their right of revolution for freedom may stand 
unimpeached by our failure, — may vindicate itself by the 
finality of our success. 

THE HOPE OF THE WORLD. 

How bright the future that shall dawn upon the world 
when this rebellion is effectually put down, and with it 
is put down forever the pretence of revolution against a 
free government I When we finish this war, we shall 
close that chapter of human history. That question set- 
tled, the political Millennium of mankind will have begun ; 
the golden age of Reason and of Right. Brougham, in- 



46 REVOLUTION AGAINST FREE GOVERNMENT. 

deed, has said, that " mixed governments can exist only 
1)}- keeping alive the right of resistance." That is their 
affair who live under such a government. But I have 
faith in a higher philosophy for the Eepublic, a nobler 
future for man. I cannot think that human society was 
] ma nt to rest upon a volcano, and to rock alternately 
in mi despotism to civil war. I cannot think that liberty 
must forever maintain a struggle for existence. Nay, the 
very right of resistance from which it sprang, shall one 
day cease because all other rights are gained. The sub- 
terranean mutterings of revolution shall be hushed in 
the grand organ-swell of freedom and righteousness that 
shakes the earth and fills the sky. 

Then Peace shall be no more a sentiment upon the 
lips of Philanthropy, but the normal condition of a State 
that has within it no disturbing cause— of a World that 
acknowledges justice and freedom to be established 
against all pretence of revolution. Then war, seen to be 
hopeless in the cause of wrong, shall no more be de- 
manded by the stern necessity of right. Far transcend- 
ing the material prosperity and grandeur that we look 
for, after the war, will be the triumph of these great 
ideas :— that Liberty extinguishes the right of revolution 
by securing all the rights of man, and that it tramples 
out Rebellion in the name and the hope of humanity. 
l - Then shall the land be Jillecl with judgment and right- 
eousness, and wisdom and knowledge shall he the sta- 
bility of our times." May I but see the dawning of thai 
day. when these blood-dripping clouds are overpast, and 
though, t«. further it in my poor measure, I should even 
go down childless to the grave, I will bless God to 
leave to an unknown posterity the golden heritage wrung 
from the mortal agony of this sublime, decisive hour! 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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